I’m curious why if they are that simple escalators are basically a monopoly (at least in Canada) with repairmen making huge dollars to fix them (which they seem to do on a weekly basis). I’m always wondering why somebody doesn’t disrupt it but it’s probably government corruption as per usual.
One shouldn't extrapolate the difficulty of making something out of metal, from a video montage of somebody making a miniature version out of cardboard. However, there is (or, was, as I haven't been on the skytrain since march of last year) something up with escalators in the Vancouver area. Not just the frequency of outages, but I've seen quite a few go out of service for weeks, in service for a few days, and then back out again. It brings to mind some absurd conspiracy theories; my favorite being that there simply aren't enough parts to go around, and the technicians are cannibalizing one to fix another.